The Trump administration was warned coming in that a global pandemic was "inevitable," including receiving a 69-page "war plan" from the Obama administration, Susan Rice, who served as former President Barack Obama's national security adviser, said Thursday.
"We have known because of our expertise in global health and our intelligence committee, and the likelihood that we were overdue for a global pandemic, that it wasn't just something that we could predict," Rice said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
Rice said she spent 12 hours, over four sessions, briefing Gen. Michael Flynn, her successor, about the various threats that could be faced, and "prominent among them was the risk of a global pandemic."
"We understood this risk to be real as you heard President Obama say in 2014," said Rice. "We had been through the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, we had been through Ebola and Zika. The Bush administration before us dealt with H5N1, a devastating flu that thankfully didn't spread as far as fast as it could have."
But Rice said she not only doesn't think the incoming administration took the playbook from the shelf but instead, "they probably put it in the trash can given how much regard they had for anything we passed off."
And in the current case, Trump was told in early January that there was a threat coming from China, said Rice.
"There is literally no excuse for this administration's lack of preparedness," she said. "Two full months were absolutely squandered. The white house was notified in early January, first from the heads of the CDC and FDA, they had heard that from China."
The administration also did not act on the fact that the United States' health system under normal conditions was not able to handle the impending crisis, said Rice.
At this point, what matters is moving forward, including continuing with social distancing, she added, as the situation is "dead serious, literally."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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